The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  Now that she knew how much she wants to touch him, her old freedom to touch him had become a self-conscious adventure of delicate, compensatory gestures. Pausing at the foot of the great staircase to bid good night to the evening’s guests, she absentmindedly touches the empty sleeve pinned to his jacket to pick off a speck of lint: she has noticed a tiny deposit of sleep in his right eye, the blind eye, and wishes she could flick it away.

  He imagines touch without his arm: when face to face, he feels sometimes he is falling toward her.

  She watches his lips, slightly parted when he is listening; when he speaks, she realizes sometimes that she has not heard a word of what he said. His features seem so very large.

  It is easier when they don’t face each other but, side by side, try to be interested in others. Right and left have new inflections. Right is the side on which the hero is maimed—his immobile eye, his empty sleeve. She notices that he invariably sits to her right, so as to offer his intact side.

  The usual alignments give rise to new, tremulous manipulations. Seated beside her at the gambling table, he becomes aware that she has been steadily scratching her left knee, and wishes she would stop before she leaves a mark on her lovely skin. (Her eczema has come back, as it does from time to time, but he cannot know that.) Without thinking, he leans nearer to her to look at the cards in her right hand, close enough to whisper some advice about her next bid, which—as he somehow divined it would—makes the hand under the table that has been scratching stop.

  How mindful they are of each other’s bodies inside their clothes. How mindful they are of the space that separates them.

  At a banquet, she becomes aware that his left thigh cannot be more than six—no, seven—inches from her right thigh. They are in the middle of the fourth course. Although he manages quite well with his elegant gold eating utensil, a hybrid device with knife fused to fork (blade facing right, tines to the left) sent him by an admirer after the Battle of the Nile, she picks up her own knife and fork, leans her upper body toward him, nearer to him, offering payment for this boldness, born of intolerable yearning, by moving her right leg several inches farther away from him, squeezing it against her own left leg. And being careful that her shoulder not touch his as she takes over the cutting of his meat.

  She is not the only person at the table this evening who has been rattled by the distance between one thing and another.

  Am I—one of their English guests was holding forth on a most unusual phenomenon she had observed—am I the only person in this gathering who has seen a little island of a picturesque form opposite the city, not much more distant than our beautiful Capri is from Naples?

  An island?

  But there is no island visible from Palermo, said another guest.

  So everyone has assured me, Miss Knight said primly.

  And when did you see this … island? Her cross-examiner was Lord Minto, former ambassador to Malta and one of the hero’s friends, who was staying with them for several weeks.

  It is not visible much of the time. When the sky is entirely cloudless, I cannot distinguish it.

  But you do see it when the day is cloudy?

  Not cloudy, Lord Minto, if by that you mean overcast. When there are a few light clouds on the horizon.

  Lady Minto laughed. Surely what you have seen is a cloud that you have mistaken for an island.

  No, it cannot be a cloud.

  And, pray, why?

  Because it always has the same distinctive shape.

  The table was silent. The Cavaliere’s wife hoped the hero would enter the conversation.

  Quite logical, said the Cavaliere. Go on, Miss Knight.

  I do not know if I am logical, she said. But I will not deny the evidence of my senses.

  Quite right, said the Cavaliere. Do go on.

  I daresay I am very persistent, she continued, and then seemed to falter, as if unsure whether she had described the trait she so admired in herself in an attractive or an unattractive way.

  But were you seeing an island? A real island?

  Yes, Lord Minto, she exclaimed. Yes, I was. For after seeing it a dozen times I sketched it, and showed my drawing to some of our officers. They immediately recognized it as one of the outermost Lipari Islands which lies—

  Vulcano, interrupted the Cavaliere.

  I do not think that was the name.

  Stromboli?

  No, I think not.

  You can see as far as the Liparis, squealed the Cavaliere’s wife. Oh, I wish I could see that far.

  A toast to Miss Knight’s stubbornness, said the hero. A woman of character, and character is what I most admire in a woman.

  Miss Knight flushed so deep a red at this compliment from the hero that the Cavaliere’s wife was moved to reach across the table and pat her hand. A relay of feeling, in which a compliment inspired by her but addressed to another brought her a chance to make substitute contact with the hero’s hand.

  It is quite impossible to see the Lipari Islands from here, declared Lord Minto.

  Since Miss Knight, after being alternately attacked and flattered by the most important men at the table, seemed adrift in feminine feelings of the self-silencing kind, the Cavaliere took the opportunity to volunteer an account of the scientific basis of mirages and other optical abnormalities—he had been reading a book about them.

  I think we must allow Miss Knight’s claim to have seen an island, he said, his voice gleaming with authority. Would not Lord Minto himself say that he has seen his own face? I mean, of course, with the aid of a mirror. So Miss Knight has seen a faraway island on motionless water in the bay of Palermo, the reflection of the island, projected in the same way a camera lucida delivers the image of an object on a plane surface but using clouds, when at a certain angle, instead of the camera lucida’s three- or four-sided prism. Many artists of my acquaintance find this ingenious apparatus quite useful in making their drawings.

  The Cavaliere’s wife pointed out to the company that her husband was an expert on every scientific question. No one, she said firmly, knows more than him.

  I cannot wait until the next day with light clouds to see Miss Knight’s ghostly island, said Mr. MacKinnon, a banker. Perhaps, if the clouds are lying right, we shall see our Naples—

  Oh, I would not want to see our Naples now, said old Miss Ellis, who had lived there for thirty years.

  Perhaps the Cavaliere will be able to see Vesuvius, said the hero gaily. I’m sure he misses his volcano.

  The Cavaliere’s wife was thinking it is not true that she would like to see far. Everything she wants to see is right here.

  * * *

  How can not one but two fascinating men dote on her? Both be so blind to her vulgarity, the shameless way she flatters them?

  The hero seemed ever more besotted, the Cavaliere more withered and passive, she more hectic and eager to exhibit herself. In their former life, in Naples, the wife of the British ambassador would not have considered adding a dance, much less a folkloric dance of erotic abandon, to her edifying repertoire of living statues. She dances the tarantella now before their guests, in Palermo. To their Sicilian acquaintances, her tambourine-shaking and foot-stamping and whirling about seemed nothing worse than odd. Or Neapolitan. But their British guests—the refugees from Naples and others who came to stay with them, such as Lord Minto on his way back to England and Lord Elgin going out to take up his post as ambassador to Turkey—were appalled, and found her manner increasingly coarse and vulgar.

  Her dress: too ostentatious. Her laugh: even louder. Her chatter: more relentless. Indeed, she was incapable of the withholding that people think of as elegance. Not only was she by nature garrulous, she thought she was always supposed to say something, and the art of understatement was as alien to her as the art of hoarding feelings. She was constantly preening herself, or flattering her husband and their friend.

  Of course, the hero flattered her just as outrageously. The finest actress of the century. The grea
test singer in Europe. The cleverest of women. And the most selfless. A paragon. But however matched they were in the throw of their effusions, it was she, being a woman, who was judged more harshly. She, they assumed, who had seduced him; her unremitting flattery that had won his heart, and made him her slave. Were she still the most celebrated beauty of the era, as she had been a decade earlier, the hero’s pitiable infatuation would have seemed all too understandable. But to be at the feet of—this?

  Her demerits mounted. But for nothing was she judged more harshly than her failure at what is deemed a woman’s greatest, most feminine accomplishment: the maintenance and proper care of a no longer youthful body. Visitors from abroad reported that the Cavaliere’s wife was continuing to put on weight; most said she had entirely lost her looks; a few allowed that she still had a beautiful head. Though it was still several decades before the Romantics inaugurated the modern cult of thinness, which was eventually to make everyone, men as well as women, feel guilty about not being thin, even then, when it was uncommon for someone wellborn to be thin, she was not to be pardoned for becoming fat.

  Odd that people judged vulgar are invariably presumed also to be lacking in self-awareness, with the implication that if only they knew how they looked or behaved they would immediately cut it out: upgrade their diction, become reticent and subtle, go on a diet. This may be the kindest form that snobbery can take, but no less obtuse for being kind. Try talking a good-natured, self-confident adult of plebeian origin out of a rich array of mannerisms called vulgar, try it—and see how successful you will be. (The Cavaliere has tried, and long ago stopped trying, or minding: he loved her.) So, it was assumed she was unaware of the change in her body. But the seams of her favorite clothes need to be let out every few months, an activity that now occupies a good deal of the energies of her dear mother, assisted by Fatima: how could she not know it? And if she overdresses now, it was precisely to say: don’t look at me, look at my satin gowns, my rings, my tasseled sash, my hat with the ostrich plumes—a strategy of self-effacement not unlike that of the collector, but considerably less effective. Her detractors looked at both.

  No letter back to England failed to make some cruel comment on her appearance. Impossible to describe how awful she looks. Her person is nothing short of monstrous in its enormity and is growing every day, wrote Lord Minto. I had been led to expect someone of undeniable physical charms, wrote Lady Elgin, but alas, no. She is indeed a Whapper!

  The reports about the loss of her beauty were as extravagant, as hyperbolic, as the reports of her beauty had once been. It was as if people had been made to praise her, and overlook her low birth and disreputable past, because she was so beautiful. Only because she was so beautiful. But now that she was no longer the epitome of beauty, all the suppressed judgments—the snobbery and the cruelty—reemerged. The spell was broken, and everyone joined in an extraordinary chorus of scorn and spitefulness.

  * * *

  One spring day, the Cavaliere announced that he had arranged an excursion to a villa belonging to the prince whose palace in town they were occupying.

  It lay on the plain east of Palermo, where many other noble families had been building country houses throughout the century; out of consideration for the hero’s defunct eye, which was hypersensitive to light, they were going out in the afternoon, when the sun would be behind them. The Cavaliere’s wife kept changing her place in the carriage to get a better view of the lush orange and lemon groves. Both men sat quietly, the hero toying with his eye shield and relishing the feeling of being taken care of, the Cavaliere anticipating the pleasure of sharing what he had gleaned from several descriptions of the villa in books by British travelers to Sicily. But he knew he must not say too much now, which would spoil the surprise in store for his companions when they reached their destination. And what a surprise it would be.

  No eccentric like a southern eccentric. Even the astonishing, cathedral-like country retreat that the Cavaliere’s rich cousin William was building back in England could not rival in insolence the villa built by the Sicilian prince’s late half brother. The large two-storied edifice of flesh-pink and white stone which the trio saw from the carriage at a distance gave no inkling of the residence’s singular contents. Its singularity was announced only when they reached the gates, which were guarded by two squatting, neckless, seven-eyed monsters, and saw before them a broad avenue lined on both sides with pedestals bearing more grotesque beings.

  Oh. Oh, look.

  Time for the Cavaliere to begin his commentary. To his wife he directed the information that Goethe had seen the villa twelve years ago, when he left Naples to go to Sicily, a year before the death of the prince who is responsible for the statues they were passing (there are more, there are more), and he took some pleasure in observing that the great poet’s reaction had been quite conventional: he had thought the villa dreadful, and presumed its owner to be mad.

  What was that, exclaimed the Cavaliere’s wife.

  They were driving rapidly past the horse with human hands, the Bactrian camel with two women’s heads for humps, the goose with a horse’s head, the man whose face sprouted an elephant’s trunk and whose hands were vulture’s claws.

  Some of the late prince’s guardian spirits, said the Cavaliere.

  And that!

  That being a man with a cow’s head riding a wildcat with a man’s head.

  Let’s stop the carriage, said the hero.

  We shall see much more than this, said the Cavaliere. He pointed to the orchestra of monkeys with drums, flutes, and violins looking out at them from the edge of the villa’s roof. Let us continue.

  Lackeys were waiting to help them from the carriage, and a podgy man in black livery, the chamberlain, stood at the threshold of the great entrance to greet them.

  I never before saw black livery, whispered the hero.

  Perhaps he still wears mourning for his master, said the Cavaliere’s wife.

  The Cavaliere smiled. I should not be surprised, my dear, if you were right.

  Outside the entrance door (warped, splintered) a dwarf with the laurel-crowned head of a Roman emperor sat astride a dolphin. The Cavaliere’s wife patted the dwarf’s head. There is more inside, said the Cavaliere, though the villa is already much despoiled. They followed the chamberlain up a rather filthy staircase and into the first floor above ground level, through halls and anterooms, past more composite creatures and odd couples.

  Oh, look!

  A double-headed peacock riding an angel on all fours.

  Lordy!

  A mermaid with a dog’s paw coupling with a stag.

  And look at this!

  The Cavaliere’s wife had stopped before two seated, sumptuously garbed figures playing cards, one a lady with a horse’s head, the other a gentleman with a griffin’s head dressed in a full-bottomed wig and crown.

  I should like to have a horse’s head for a day, she exclaimed. And see what it would feel like.

  Oh, said the hero. I’m sure you would be a most beautiful horse.

  I should like to see the faces of our guests when you sat down to play faro with such a head on your shoulders, said the Cavaliere. No doubt you would win every game.

  The Cavaliere’s wife gave a robust imitation of a horse’s neigh, and both men broke into laughter.

  The Cavaliere was ready to join in the mockery of the late prince’s affectations, to be at one with his wife and their friend. But he wanted to make sure that their amusement was as saturated with knowledge as his own. Wherever he was, the Cavaliere was prone to cast himself in the role of the guide or mentor. At a funeral he would have lectured a fellow mourner on the history of cemetery monuments. What a deft antidote to anxiety or grief one’s own erudition can be.

  Stimulated by the prince’s penchant for horses with limbs or the head of some other creature and humans with horses’ heads, the Cavaliere began to recount the stories of Chiron, Pegasus, and other horses in ancient mythology with extra parts. He thou
ght it worth pointing out that these mutants were always semi-divine creatures. Recall Achilles’ wise tutor, who was half horse, half human. Or the hippogriff, whose father was a griffin and whose mother was a filly, and in Ariosto is a symbol of love.

  Love. The Cavaliere’s wife heard the word resound in the sepulchral silence of the villa. She had not pronounced it. Nor their friend.

  The Cavaliere is not really thinking about love, but the word seems as good a talisman as any against the unsettling violence of feeling expressed in the grotesque inventions with which the prince had populated the villa and its grounds.

  Their friend was dodging the thought of love too, and ventured a small contribution of his own to the learned discussion. In Egypt, said the victor of the Battle of the Nile, I was told of an immense statue that is a creature with the head and boson of a woman and the lower limbs of a lion. She must be an awesome sight, crouching in the sand.

  Yes, yes, I read about that! She waits for passing travelers and she makes them halt and then she kills them. Except those that can solve a riddle, them she spares.

  That’s another cruel creature, my dear, said the Cavaliere gently. But I would not be surprised if we were to come across either your Sphinx or the Egyptian one, or something resembling, here in these very rooms, among the prince’s stone companions. Shall we look for her?

  And we’ll think of a riddle to ask her, cried the Cavaliere’s wife.

  They passed into another drawing room, calling out to one another as they came across more tableaux of the deformed and ill-coupled, the chamberlain trailing behind, a silent reproach to their gaiety and their wish to condescend to what they were seeing.

  The human imagination has always been entertained by the fantasy of biological misalliances, and by the reality of bodies that don’t look as bodies are supposed to look, which can endure ordeals bodies are not supposed to be able to endure. Painters loved to invent such creatures when they had the pretext. Circuses and fairs display them: freaks, mutants, odd couples, animals doing stunts that violate their nature. The Cavaliere may not have been familiar with Bosch and Bruegel on the subject of hell or the torments of Saint Anthony, but he had seen somewhat less inspired depictions of those anatomical assemblages called demons or monsters. Were it only a question of these freakish beings in every corner, the contents of the prince’s lair would not have been so original. Even more astonishing was the profusion of whimsical, threatening—no, freakish—objects.